Intel Touts Possibility of 1,000-Core Processors

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Are AMD’s 12-core Opteron chips not enough for you? An Intel researcher said that the architecture for the company’s experimental 48-core Single Chip Cloud Computer is “arbitrarily scalable,” according to IDG News.

The 48-core chip, first unveiled in December 2009, features 24 nodes. Each node contains two processors, in order to reduce the number of cross connections. All 48 cores could run with as little as 25 watts total; the chip maxes out at 125 watts with everything at full throttle. The chip itself isn’t fast yet, as it’s really a design study for now; the individual core designs are simply original Pentium processors from 1993 with a standard x86 instruction set.

But the potential for extreme power is there. “This is an architecture that could, in principle, scale to 1,000 cores,” Intel researcher Timothy Mattson said at the Supercomputer 2010 conference in New Orleans. “I can just keep adding, adding, adding cores.” Once engineers surpass 1,000 cores, Mattson said that the mesh, or on-chip network that connects the cores, would grow large enough to begin dragging down performance.

Normally, the more cores you add to a design, the tougher it is to scale it so that each core has the same view of the system’s memoryotherwise known as cache coherencythe report said. It’s faster to just eliminate cache coherency and design the chip so that the individual cores can pass data to each other directly, Mattson said. Each core in the 48-core chip contains a mesh interface component that sends data packets to other cores via an on-board router using TCP/IP.

Because of the poor individual core performance, there are no plans to bring this exact chip into production. But much faster varieties are a strong possibility. For example, Intel announced in May 2010 that it is planning to bring its first Knights Corner chip, which will include over 50 cores, to market sometime in the next few years using a 22-nanometer production process.

Last week, China’s Tianhe-1A officially displaced the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system as the most powerful supercomputer in the world. The Tianhe-1A employs Nvidia GPUs for accelerated processing, a technique shared by 28 of the 500 supercomputers on the latest November 2010 TOP500 list.